Brexit: Initial Reflections Anand Menon and John-Paul Salter Introduction At around 4:30 on the morning of 24 June 2016, the media began to announce that the British people had voted to leave the European Union. As the final results came in, it emerged that the pro-Brexit campaign had garnered 51.9% of the votes cast, and prevailed by a margin of 1,269,501 votes. For the first time in its history, a member state had voted to quit the EU. The outcome of the referendum reflected the confluence of several long term and more contingent factors. In part, it represented the culmination of a longstanding tension in British politics between, on the one hand, London’s relative effectiveness in shaping European integration to match its own preferences and, on the other, political diffidence when it came to trumpeting such success. This paradox, in turn, resulted from longstanding intraparty divisions over Britain’s relationship with the EU, which have hamstrung such attempts as there have been to make a positive case for British EU membership. Consequently, public opinion remained lukewarm at best, treated to a diet of more or less combative and eurosceptic political rhetoric that frequently disguised a different reality. It was also a consequence of the referendum campaign itself. The strategy adopted by Prime Minister David Cameron of adopting a critical stance towards the EU, promising a referendum, and ultimately campaigning for continued membership proved a failure. In particular, his gamble on the outcome of his much vaunted renegotiation proved reckless. Against this, the Leave camp ran an effective campaign, highlighting key themes that resonated with a public increasingly disinclined to trust their leading politicians. The referendum represented a turning point in British politics. Debates about it divided the country in the weeks before 23 June, and on the day itself a large turnout testified to the mobilisation that had been achieved. Yet the outcome revealed a country profoundly divided by class, by wealth, by education and by geography. Crafting an exit from the EU that takes account of this complexity and garners the support of a significant proportion of the population will be no easy task. And at the time of writing there remain doubts that the referendum will actually lead to a British exit. Some senior politicians, and a number of campaign groups have committed themselves to trying to prevent such an outcome. In what follows we cast an initial eye over the referendum and its outcome. A first section examines the historical relationship between the UK and the EU, illustrating the way in which party politics accounted for the paradox of relative effectiveness coexisting with relative hostility, which in turn explains the absence of any attempt systematically to convince the British people of the 1 benefits of EU membership. Section two looks at the policies towards the EU pursued under the coalition government in power between 2010 and 2015, and the way they set the scene for the referendum to come. Third, we examine the attempt by Cameron to renegotiate the terms of UK EU membership, while section four considers the referendum campaign. Section five looks at initial data on the outcome of the referendum, whilst a final part considers what may now transpire. Britain and European Integration 1973-2010 Since the UK joined the European Community in 1973, its attitudes towards membership have been marked by a striking paradox. On the one hand, Britain is routinely described as an awkward or recalcitrant partner, a member state that has opted out of key elements of integration and demonstrated at best half- hearted enthusiasm for even those parts in which it participated. On the other, the record of British EU membership has been one of effectively shaping the development of European integration to suit its own interests.1 Awkward… The notion of Britain as an ‘awkward partner’ was popularised by Stephen George in his textbook first published in 1990.2 This awkwardness has a lengthy heritage, pre-dating membership of the Community. When the governments of France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) Britain chose to remain aloof. In 1957, the six states established the European Economic Community (the EEC). Again, Britain was invited to join. Again, London declined. By the early 1960s, economic growth in the six EEC member states had begun to outstrip that of the UK, and so Britain twice sought entry. Both applications were vetoed by Charles de Gaulle, and it was not until after his departure that the Conservative government of Edward Heath finally joined. Yet membership did not lay British reservations to rest. The signatures on the UK’s accession treaty had barely dried when, in January 1975, Harold Wilson called a referendum on the terms of membership. Four years later Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street and immediately demanded that Britain’s budgetary settlement be reopened. In 1984, following years of belligerent rhetoric (“I want my money back”) and bad tempered bargaining, she secured a rebate on Britain’s contributions to the Community budget. In 1988, the tone of her speech at that altar of pro-European thought - the College of Europe in Bruges - caused consternation as she underlined her preference for cooperation among sovereign states over control by supranational institutions. 1 Anand Menon and John-Paul Salter, ‘Britain’s Influence in the EU,’ NIESR Review, 236, May 2016, pp. 7-13. 2 George, S. (1998) An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 2 Mrs Thatcher’s ultimate demise (itself prompted by struggles within her party over Europe) failed to resolve the ‘Europe issue’ that was coming to dominate British politics. The UK found itself almost alone among the member states in opposing further economic and political integration, and its recalcitrance greatly hampered the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty. John Major insisted on the deletion of the word ‘federal’, as well as opt outs from Economic and Monetary Union and the Social chapter, as conditions for his signature. The 1992 General Election reduced the Conservative majority in parliament from around 100 to just 21, and consequently, the Government’s policies towards the EU became the object of a ceaseless guerrilla war fought by Conservative euroscpetics enraged by the Maastricht treaty and energised by its rejection by a Danish referendum. Consequently, Britain continued to act as a brake on the ambitions of its European partners. In 1994 Major vetoed the nomination of Jean-Luc Dehaene to succeed Jacques Delors as Commission president, arguing that he was too federalist - only to find that the job went to the similarly-inclined Jacques Santer. Subsequently, in retaliation against a failure on the part of the EU to lift a ban on the export of British beef following the BSE scandal, he launched a policy of non- cooperation. Ministers and officials continued to attend meetings, but constantly raised the issue of beef exports while blocking anything requiring unanimous agreement – even if these had been British initiatives in the first place.3 Gordon Brown and particularly Tony Blair enjoyed large parliamentary majorities, and were far less hostile towards the EU than had been some of their Conservative predecessors. Policy under New Labour reflected this, in that, despite the occasionally caustic tone with which British political leaders were wont to lecture their continental colleagues, and the bitterness that surrounded the Iraq War of 2003, relations with EU partners were not marked by the ill- tempered contestation of the Thatcher years. That being said, the UK still proved a reluctant participant in negotiations over an EU constitution, and when it came to signing the Lisbon Treaty that finally emerged in 2009, Brown, harried by domestic opponents of the treaty, announced he was ‘too busy’ to personally attend, and a second ceremony had to be specially arranged for him. … yet effective At the political level, then, British attitudes have been characterised by wariness at best and on occasion outright hostility towards European integration. Yet, away from the media spotlight, the story of routine British engagement with the European Union is very different. Many critics of British policies towards the European Union have tended to confuse popularity with an ability to proactively shape outcomes.4 For all the problems that have beset political relations between London and Brussels, the former has proven remarkably successful when it comes to this ability. This paradox is perhaps best exemplified by the Bruges speech. As we 3 Stephen Wall, A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 115-157. 4 Anand Menon and Vincent Wright, ‘The Paradoxes of “Failure”: British EU Policy Making in Comparative Perspective,’ Public Policy and Administration, 13, 46, 1998, p. 59. 3 have seen, it achieved notoriety both at the time and subsequently5 for its acerbic criticism of the centralising tendencies manifested by the then European Community. Yet this was due in no small part to the way in which it was spun by her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, who ensured that the British press picked up the Prime Minister’s claim that she had ‘not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level.’6 What was less remarked upon – both at